


What the Knife Intends

by SomethingIrrational



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-22
Updated: 2017-03-29
Packaged: 2018-10-09 05:48:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10405293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomethingIrrational/pseuds/SomethingIrrational
Summary: The Man on the Bridge is invasive, intrusive, startles something out of the Winter Soldier that wells up no matter how he forces it back down. The animal isn't like that. Instead it slots into place so he hardly notices it.The Asset recovers Bucky Barnes' daemon."I'll be looking for you, Will, every moment. Every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you." --The Amber Spyglass





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "The intentions of a tool are what it does. A hammer intends to strike, a vise intends to hold fast, a lever intends to lift. They are what it is made for. But sometimes a tool may have other uses that you don't know. Sometimes in doing what you intend, you also do what the knife intends, without knowing."

At first the Asset isn’t even sure about the animal’s name.

That might sound insignificant, because he isn’t sure about his own name either. He knows what the Man on the Bridge called him, but the words the Man on the Bridge gave him were inaccessible in a way that the animal isn’t. He never wanted a name; he knew his designations and codenames and callsigns and they were sufficient. Sufficient is a good word for it, he thinks; he never wanted more, never even had a clue that there was more.

He doesn’t remember when he first became aware of the animal. Not when he was given his assignment; not in the Director’s kitchen; not on the Bridge. Not on the Helicarrier, but it was close. By the time he’s towing the Man on the Bridge out of the Hudson—and if the Man weren’t unconscious the Asset would probably have to knock him out anyway, since drowning men flail in a way not conducive to water rescue—he sees the animal on the shore. He ignores it.

He crawls up to the shore, letting the water do most of the work of buoying the Man along, and only when he’s at the very edge does he stand. Then the animal moves, leaning sleek head forward and gripping the man’s uniform with its teeth, pulling him onto the land as the Asset pushes. The flash of white fangs slots into place in the Asset’s mind, something familiar without the pressure, the nagging feeling the Man on the Bridge gave him. He can accept the animal’s presence in a way that he can’t fully accept the Man’s, without interrogating it.

There was an Animal on the Helicarrier too, a different animal. It had teeth, too, but it didn’t show them. The Asset expected the Animal to bite, to sink claws into him as he had the Man on his back, as his fists thudded into the Man’s face trying to make him stop talking, to make the pain he startled up in the Asset just go away. Instead it pressed its pointed face, its black muzzle, into his side; it climbed the straps of his gear and looked for the vulnerable skin at his throat and he threw it away but all it did was cry, scream with a woman’s voice.

Where is it?

The Asset comes to a halt on the shore, his hands pressed down into the mud as he tries to think. Slowly he lifts his head and makes eye contact with the animal on the shore, the one who is now licking water from the man’s hairline, salving wounds and bruises with its tongue. Its tongue is soft, the Asset thinks, looking at it. He doesn't know how he knows it, but he does.

The animal looks at him and the Asset’s whole field of vision sharpens. He is looking at the animal, black eyes on him and thick tongue tending to the Man; but he is also looking at himself, and the eyes he sees in his filth-smeared face are white all the way around. Afraid. Weak.

Where is the Animal? The one who was with the man. He threw it last into the disc of the shield and they went down together, he’s sure of it—two shapes falling down into the water. It was not left on the Helicarrier to crash. That is viscerally important to him. He wasn’t aware that he’d even taken note of where it went until right now.

He’s had animals fight him before. Large ones, small ones, some becoming an obstacle to take care of on his missions, others put neatly down from a distance, bursting into gold dust. He can imagine the sun on the sudden cloud of gold, and he looks at the man’s hair, and he is whirling back to the water before he can even consciously put the two images together.

The Animal is out in the middle of the river. It is swimming away from the wreckage, slow and weak, its small legs barely moving. When it sees him it becomes faster, paddling harder, lifting its head out of the water so it can speak to him.

“Bucky,” it gasps. “Bucky.”

His arm is outstretched in a breaststroke and it just swims into the sweep of his arm, bumping up against him all wet fur and cold nose pressing into his cheek.

“We knew,” the Animal moans. “Bucky. Bucky.”

He closes his arm around the Animal and swims back to the shore, to the Man and other animal, and all the way the Animal cries that name, right until they’re at the water’s edge again and the Asset just about crawls out of it. Three points of contact with the ground and the other arm, the flesh one, the weak one, holding the Animal tight to his chest. He crawls to the Man’s side—

“Steve,” the Animal begins to murmur. Its voice is weak.

The Asset is nearly winded by the swim. He gets on his knees, taking the Animal in both hands, and he lowers it to the Man’s chest, where it curls. The shape it takes is round, like the shield. The head points at the Man’s jaw. The Asset thinks it’s too tired to move. It will not impede him.  
He gets to his feet and gives one last look at the Man and the Animal stretched out on the bank.

“Don’t go,” the Animal begs. “Please, don’t go. Bucky, please.”

He turns away. The other animal takes to his side, walks in step with him and doesn’t seem to require any cues from him. It’s not even worth the effort of shooing it off; it will help him blend in the urban and suburban areas he will likely have to traverse to escape.

“Bucky, no. Please. Bucky, please. Please! Bucky!”

The Animal’s screams will call attention to it and the Man. First responders will locate him. There is no reason for the Asset to stay.

“And every reason to run,” the animal beside him murmurs, quiet. Even next to him, a man wouldn’t have heard it; only the Asset can. He turns his head slightly to look down at it. It is a stripe of brown fur, ragged; it does not turn its head to look at him in return.

It seems not to require anything of him at all, and if it begins to slow him down the Asset can leave it behind. In the meantime he must acquire a disguise of some sort, and a vehicle to leave the city in. He must dispose of his tac gear where it will not be noticed.

When he steals the car he doesn’t even need to open the door for the animal; it slides in through his open door and across the bench seat to the passenger side in one liquid motion. It sits down on the seat and turns its back to him. The Asset stands with a hand on the open car door for a moment, and then he folds himself into the driver’s seat and puts his seatbelt on. He closes the door with a jerk.

“Punk,” the animal says.

This is not a cue that he knows, so he ignores it and starts the engine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So the big struggle here was getting both Steve and his daemon out of the river alive. After that I thought that Bucky going back for the shield might be a bit of overkill, so this is what we've got to work with.
> 
> Daemon names and descriptions will come in later chapters, as Bucky's attitude toward daemons changes from "why the fuck not." Ratings and tags will change as this fic becomes more defined--settles, if you will.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "That's what you are. Argue with anything else, but don't argue with your own nature."

The Asset makes his way back to Arlington. Traffic is strange, dead for stretches and then bursting into lanes choked with civilians trying to evacuate the city. The animal sits in the passenger seat, wet nose pressed against the glass and leaving prints.

If the Asset cared about his own feelings, he would admit to something like relief at the idea of returning to the dropoff point where he woke up. If handlers are waiting there for him, this whole thing will be out of his hands once more. He can yield responsibility for himself and the animal.

On the other hand, his orders were to perform two very high profile assassinations in broad daylight. The Asset was made for precision, but the demands of this mission were to make a mess, to call attention. He is accustomed to performing as an M24, but they asked him to perform as a cannon.

Do it one last time, the Director told him. It’s enough to make him wonder if there will be any mission support waiting for him at the dropoff at all.

The animal twists around in the passenger seat so it can touch its nose to his fingers where they’re wrapped around the gearshift. It’s a cold touch, and he is reminded that it’s not his place to wonder. The purpose of mission support is to take these concerns out of his hands and into more equipped. A weapon does not think.

He parks two blocks away from the dropoff. If he walks there, it will keep any police attention to the stolen car away from his destination—though, he speculates, the downed helicarrier in the Potomac is likely a priority. It’s possible the Man on the Bridge has been found and rescued already.

He closes the car door and steps onto the sidewalk, and suddenly the animal collides with the passenger side window. Its nails scrabble at the glass. The Asset comes around the car and stands staring at it. When it sees that it isn’t walking off without it, it stops pawing at the car’s interior and stares back at him, paws pressed against the door. Brown fur stands up in a long ridge down its neck and back.

“You won’t make it without me,” it says in a woman’s voice. It’s a sort of dull scratchy voice, but it’s definitely female; he realizes it only now because this is the first time it’s said enough syllables to get a sense of it.

The Asset considers what the animal says. He is certain he can get back to the dropoff without assistance from the animal—clearly not just a nonsentient animal the way that guard dogs are, since it speaks and appears to respond to his trains of thought, but no more necessary than it ever has been.

He should be walking away now. He should be heading back to Hydra’s territory because there’s no time to lose. Instead he continues to stare at the animal through the car window.

“You go anywhere without me and you’ll call attention to yourself. You go without me and everyone will see you for what you are, so come on and let me out.” It jerks in place as if its weight will make a difference to the car locks.

The animal is correct about that. If he hopes to pass unnoticed through civilian areas, he will need the illusion of having a daemon. On previous missions where he was meant to appear as no more than one of the crowd, he was given an empty capsule to wear as a pendant around his neck to give the illusion of a delicate insect daemon. On other occasions, he was given a small mass to put into a shirt pocket, so a small animal could plausibly be hiding inside his clothes. But for most of his missions it wasn’t necessary. He wasn’t meant to be seen, so the fact that the Asset has only one body was irrelevant.

He’s seen daemons die before. He’s taken aim at them and watched them burst into golden clouds. The people beside them dropped without even knowing what happened, most of the time. Some of them twisted to look around, wondering why the presence of that other body could no longer be taken for granted. Those people died with anguish on their faces.

The Asset is unimpressed. He has always been alone. Being one of two seems like a profound weakness.

It would be easy to go back to being alone now. He could kill the animal easily. All he would have to do is reach through the window, take the loose skin of its throat in his hand and press up on the trachea until it suffocated. The Asset, being unhindered, isn’t sure who would die with the animal. Maybe he kills it here and somewhere else in the city someone drops dead.

The animal sinks into a steeper crouch against the window and shows its teeth. “I came this far to get you,” it says. It thumps the glass with its foreleg. “I came this far and now it’s your goddamn turn, you stupid beast.”

The animal speaks not like a fellow asset, or a soldier under the Asset’s command, but a handler. And if it is a handler, he has to listen to it. His radio was fried when he submerged it in the Potomac, and the tracker in his arm was likewise damaged.

“There you go,” the animal says. “There you go, come on.”

The Asset opens the car door.

If anyone is looking for him, they will be looking for the Asset, in combat jacket and leather, weapon bared. They will not be looking for a man in civilian clothes with—he assesses the animal with his eyes—a floppy brown bitch for a daemon.

The animal doesn’t fall, but leaps out in one fluid motion. She is of medium-high height, as dogs go; he has never encountered her particular breed in a professional capacity before. Civilians have them, he’s sure. She will be good for disguise.

Once she’s clear of the door he closes it again and turns away, heading for the dropoff point. He does not need to look at her for guidance, and she does not interrupt his stride by getting in his way or by issuing other orders. The click of her nails on the sidewalk tells him she is walking at his side. As they approach the building, she growls once, then is silent. She stills at the door to the laboratory. Irritated, the Asset pushes her out of the way with his knee and opens the door.

The lab has been stripped and abandoned. The Asset does a quick assessment and determines that the and the dog are alone. Some of the tools are left in the basement, abandoned on countertops beside a sink as though the technicians left in a hurry. He puts the bite guard in his mouth and uses pliers to remove the damaged tracking device himself.

When issuing mission orders, the director asked him to change the world one last time. The high profile nature of his last two targets—Nicholas J. Fury and the man on the bridge, known as Captain America—lead him to believe that his cover is burnt. If he is extracted, surely he will be kept in storage in cryostasis until awareness of him has faded from public consciousness. If he is not extracted—

He hasn’t consciously considered his options before, but as he chases the trains of thought he finds pieces of evidence snapping into place, one after another, like magnets clicking together—

He wouldn’t have rescued the Man on the Bridge if he was certain he would face consequences from his handlers. He not only violated the terms of his mission, he actively ensured its failure by acting to rescue the Man on the Bridge from the Potomac. That could have stood if he wanted Hydra to find the body on the bank later, as proof that he had executed his mission. But he went back for the Daemon.

The Daemon was relatively small. He’s willing to bet that only an asset with his capabilities would have been able to recover something that size from the wreckage; it was swimming along stubbornly when he found it, but it was obvious that it was exhausted. He could have left it to drown and wash away in the river water. Streak the water with gold.

He didn’t. He saved it. Brought it back to the Man on the Bridge, left it on his chest.

The Asset has been disciplined before, but he can’t even imagine the kind of consequences he would bring down on himself if his handlers knew what he did. He’s been tortured into unconsciousness before for making a mistake. What he did today made him not just an impediment to the mission, but a detriment. If the Man on the Bridge—Captain America—is truly a threat to Hydra, aiding him would make the Asset a threat to Hydra as well.

The Asset concludes that extraction is not in his best interest at this time.

The dog snorts. “Well ain’t that the understatement of the fuckin’ century.”

He turns around and sees that the dog has leapt up onto the chair and is curled in the seat, long snout poked under the armrest. The shackles sit open and empty like a waiting trap, but she appears unaffected. That seems to indicate that she isn’t an asset and has never been subjected to the chair before, making it more likely that she is a handler of some sort.

“You came to find me,” he says slowly to her.

She lifts her head. “Yeah, I did.” She drops her nose to fix him with a long stare over his snout. Her eyes are round and black, entirely unimpressive.

No handler’s daemon has ever spoken to him before. Technicians tend to have primate daemons, with their delicate little hands managing weapons and surgery. Agents and other assets tend to have dog daemons, as proof of their willingness to serve.

“Are you an agent?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “I’m with the Army.”

The Asset considers this. He holds the pliers pinched in his flesh hand and turns them over and over to watch the light shine off the tracking device. It is not the first time he’s participated in a mission run by a branch of the military.

“And you’re here for me.”

"Yeah."

"And I'm yours now."

“Yeah.”

The Asset remembers that it would be easy to kill her. He’s certain that he could be across the room and crush her trachea before she could react appropriately. Maybe she’d get away from the chair and skitter into a corner.

To test her, he asks, “What would you have done if this lab were staffed?”

She stands up on the chair and locks the joints of her legs. They bend back oddly, but he gets the distinct impression that she will not be moved. “I’d have told you to kill them all,” she says.

He’s pushing his luck with one question, but if he’s going to consign his agency to her he’s got to know she’s good enough to follow.  
“What would you have done if I hadn’t listened?”

“I would have killed you,” she says again. “I still might.”

Well, the Asset decides. If she’s capable of that, she must be more than she appears as a handler.

“Okay,” he says. “Ready for orders.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here I've revealed that Bucky's daemon is a dog. The exact sort of dog and my explanation for this choice will become apparent later, as Bucky begins to give more of a fuck.
> 
> I'm planning to write a spotlight on Steve and his daemon next chapter, so get psyched!
> 
> Also if you got thirty frickin emails as I struggled my way through managing the edits to this chapter and transferring work notes into chapter one, I apologize and commend you for sticking it out. I'm just very unprofessional as a person.


End file.
